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Why Apple and Google Made Their Own Programming Languages
Gamoid writes: This Business Insider article looks into the state of Google Go and Apple Swift, highlighting what the two languages have in common — and why tech companies would bother involving themselves in the programming language holy wars. From the article: "One fringe benefit for Google and Apple is that making your own programming language makes recruitment easier — for instance, since it builds a lot of its own server applications in Go, Google is more likely to hire a developer who's already proficient in the language since she would need less training."
So... how does creating another programming language help recruitment?
Because they studied Computer Science. If it was easier to do, we would also have people making new CPU architectures and operating systems, just because.
being the future?
That sentence is actually valid in Brainfuck language.
839*929
Really. That last sentence proves it. They have no fucking idea what different languages are good for, or not.
From wikipedia
Go's "gc" compiler targets the Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Plan 9, and Microsoft Windows operating systems and the i386, amd64, ARM and IBM POWER processor architectures/ A second compiler, gccgo, is a GCC frontend.
So there are two major compilers for Go already, one of which is gcc based which targets just about every platform under the sun. I'm not saying go will run everywhere gcc will compile code because the runtime also needs porting, but it is very cross platform.
I developed one of my command line apps in Go http://rclone.org/ and I release binaries for it which run on Windows, OS X, Linux, *BSD and even Plan 9 all cross compiled from my Linux workstation.
Every man for himself, all in favour say "I"
This is a bad article; and the submitter, editor, and readers should all feel bad.
And Apple's been doing this for longer. Even though Objective-C is technically not a platform-exclusive language, it currently is for all practical purposes. That's why I never bothered to spend any time learning it.
I have done C#, but only when someone was paying me to do it. Haven't really done it on my own time. (Even if it is also technically cross-platform, its still 99% a Microsoft-universe language. At least its similar enough to other languages that it wasn't much trouble to pick up.)
Given the choice, its generally been C, C++, or Java. My selection between those tends to depend more on the application/platform that arbitrary preference.
"Google is more likely to hire a developer who's already proficient in the language since she would need less training."
This is the worst argument I have ever seen and is a total recipe of disaster. Imagine MS only hiring VB people, Oracle hiring PL/SQL and SAP hiring ADABAS and IBM hiring FORTRAN/COBOL people, where would they be today?
There's already solutions like Xamarin that get C# working on quite a few platforms, and Microsoft is pushing to make it work on all platforms as well. I hope they guan get visual studio working on other platforms and make something that allows me to write code once and have it run anywhere, even if I have to tweak the UI for different platforms. C#, Visual Studio, and the .Net runtime is one of the best programming environments there is. Windows app development is so much less painful than Android. If they can make C# easy to run across all devices, they'll attract a lot of developers and (as I'm sure is their plan), bring a lot more apps to the Windows desktop and phone app stores.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The reason why companies develop new languages is because the ones coming from academia are focused on the wrong things. Product development requires an industrial strength, strongly typed (for the most part) fast language.
Projects coming from academia are interpreted, JVM based, functional, obsessed with (im)mutability, closures, and lambda functions.
This is not to say those things are not nice, however they are not central to a programming language as used in large scale industrial systems.
Someone at Apple just has the hots for that blonde singer.
I don't blame them. :)
Both languages are expensive API filth, off with their heads!!!
Add to that, Go and Swift are pretty small languages. Learning either is something that a moderately competent programmer ought to be able to do in a few weeks. Neither is sufficiently different to other languages that there's a big cognitive jump. The difficult thing is always learning new libraries and frameworks, not learning a new language (well, unless the new language is C++, where after a decade of daily use developers are still not surprised to come across a language feature that they've never seen before).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
is it really impossible for anyone to believe that a language and toolchain can actually
make an organization more productive?
it seems like everyone is so lost in technical marketing that they've forgotten
about actually programming computers
Everyone should be scared of Web based apps. Because web based apps suck.
It doesn't matter how many platforms Go compiles for; what matters is how much demand there is for Go programmers. Outside of Google, the answer is approximately zero, so it's a bad choice if you're worried about your continuing employability. C++, on the other hand, is used all over the place, so it's a very safe bet.
Yeah, those "benefits" make no sense.
C#, a relatively new language, has a massive library of solutions created for it, tons of open source code out there to leverage for everything from server applications to mobile games. Go and Swift? I'd be surprised if there is a tenth of a percent of the open source code out there as there is for C#, which is further dwarfed by C++ and again, by an order of magnitude by C code.
Of course, C# has a much larger ecosystem, which is also kind of the point.
As for hires who "know" Go or Swift... WTF? Why is it any sort of advantage to make your potential hiring pool smaller? That only means there will be far fewer competent candidates to hire for a job.
Anyone who is proficient in Swift has hundreds or thousands of companies outside of Apple looking to hire them. Apple has to compete with every iOS software development shop in the world for those people.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
More change for the sake of change
http://saveie6.com/
I hope they guan get visual studio working on other platforms
To that end, you could try out Visual Studio Code, which was introduced at the build conference this year.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
The makers of this article clearly have no background in computing, or journalism either for that matter. I'm surprised I didn't see a reference to the Illuminati in there somewhere. Bizarrely, the article doesn't even mention Dart, which is no doubt due to the two-minute Bing search that I'd imagine formed the entirety of their background research.
When considered against the status quo for their purposes and eras, all of these languages show significant, useful advances in programming. And if we're going to declare all languages that are created by a for-profit corporation invalid, say goodbye to Java, C#, C++, and C. Hell, even the Jacquard Loom was meant to make money.
with D serving as an advanced alternative. I view SWIFT as an Apple way to say that its platform is closed in every possible sense.
It took me less than a week to learn go. I still don't know all of C++ after two years. Learning Go was not a bad investment: the perspective I learned from it helped me write better C++ and C# code from both a OOP design perspective and threading perspectives, and is also a nice thing for my resume (Maybe is helped me get my option to work for Google, I don't know).
VIsual Studio Code is a simple code editor (although with quite a few enhancements). It does have nothing to do with Visual Studio. For example: it cannot compile C# code of any kind (Winforms, WPF, ASP.NET). On the other hand, I do recognise that Visual Studio Code is a pretty good editor; I am already using it as partial replacement of NotePad++ (when writing PHP, for example). Although I hope that MS will be improving quite a few things within the short term.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
If you've made your own language, you're more likely to keep your experienced employees because there are fewer places for them to go to if they jump ship. Sure, there will be companies that use the language because they have to develop software for Google or Apple, but the employees are going to be a lot more locked-in than if they were experienced in something more widely used such as C or Python.
There is a minor recruiting benefit, only to "go".
WHY SWIFT IS NOT BENEFICIAL:
Internally, Apple doesn't write a lot of Apps; they might, eventually, convert some of their existing large applications, like Pages or Mail.App, over to Swift; these will largely end up being rewrites. So while knowing Swift might make you better able to get a job at a software house targeting Apple's platforms, it's unlikely to be meaningful in getting a job at Apple.
On the other hand, one benefit to Apple is that if Swift is not strongly used internally, the demand for App developers is unlikely to hire away Apple engineers out from under Apple, which was a big issue with the Objective C "brain drain" when iPhone and other apps took off. One of the things that Apple did, for example, was not let registered developers who were also Apple employees, take App programming classes held by Apple, for a period of six months after they started offering them to non-Apple employees. So there is an "anti-recruiting away of Apple employees" benefit to Apple.
WHY GO IS BENEFICIAL:
The recruiting benefit of "go" is clearer, although even with gccgo, go is not very portable to non-Linux platforms, despite its claimed platform support (for example, the standard libraries *still* have some serious compatibility issues on Mac OS X, despite the fact that almost every Google employee has an Apple laptop).
One thing that companies like to hire is young people; on the theory that "you can't teach an old dog new tricks", someone who knows "go" is a lot more likely to be younger, rather than older. It's not valid due to the theory, but it is nevertheless valid enough that you can pretty much use it as something of an age filter, and legally get away with doing do.
Another thing it means is that you're willing to learn new things; a surprising number of people aren't. If you got into software engineering for the money, and you are just using it as a "paycheck continuation program", instead of actually being passionate about it, it's unlikely that you've bothered to take the time to learn "go".
These are relatively minor benefits, since it doesn't take that long to learn a new language well enough to work in it pretty extensively; so training is not really a benefit, as the article claims.
*eye ball roll*
Why. It's not criminally PC to use either singular pronoun when referring to a hypothetical person. I think the fact that you felt it necessary to comment on it says more about you than the author.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Why single one group out at all? Why not use "he or she" or simple rephrase it.
Google is more likely to hire a developer who's already proficient in the language.
Google is more likely to hire a developer who's already proficient in the language due to lower training costs.
Google is more likely to hire a developer who's already proficient in the language reducing operating costs.
I implore you to drop out of this conversation.
What bias? A bias against assuming all programmers are men? Guilty.
How does using "she" differ from using "he"? Why is "he" an acceptable default but "she" not?
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
One fringe benefit for Google and Apple is that making your own programming language makes recruitment easier --- for instance, since it builds a lot of its own server applications in Go, Google is more likely to hire a developer who's already proficient in the language since she would need less training.
And had Google used C, it would be more likely to hire someone who's good with C, since they would need less training.
Of course, C# has a much larger ecosystem, which is also kind of the point.
Of course, C# is also Microsoft's baby, which is enough to disqualify it from use inside Apple and Google all by itself. Nobody at either of those companies is going to risk relying on Microsoft's intellectual property for anything mission-critical.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Because if they used, for example, Java, when they hired an experienced Java developer they would need MORE training?
Approximately how large is the pool of 'experienced' Go/Swift programmers outside of Google/Apple?
Ken
"I'm still scratching my head over the use of "she" instead of "they" in that sentence."
It's Corpspeak. You have to use a precisely equal number of male and female pronouns, even when that means shifting gender confusingly back and forth throughout your Powerpoint presentation. But if your presentation contains a example of bad procedure, you have to use a male pronoun at that point ("If the nurse were to stick his finger in the 220V socket during Step 5...")
...and now the SJWs have weighed in. :-P
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
The media is so fixated on these two companies that they're leaving out other competitors that don't come to mind in this exact same sector.
Facebook now has their own language: Hack. It runs on their own interpreter: HHVM.
This is similar in mind to the jump from C to C++, wherein existing PHP code mostly runs on HHVM unmodified, but switching to Hack adds a couple restrictions (fixing long standing issues with the PHP language), while adding countless new features (such as type safety and parallel I/O)
But Facebook is just "those other guys", right? They're not a tech company at all, they're just some web thingiemajigger.
He means "I tinkered with this new thing and it seemed pretty easy enough, so that was enough - I never needed to use it, so I never found out all the edge cases I know about in the mainstream languages I use every day".
Its why many people like new languages and things, they think they're simple because they only have to scratch the surface for some simple example and think that's all there is to it.
I'd define 'learn' as be able to read 90% of the code that's out there. And yes, I can easily see C++ taking years by that standard.
"Yes, our code *does* overload the 'space' character, I thought you said you knew C++!" :-).
Choosing to do all internal communication in your own language makes recruitment easier -- for instance, since it builds a lot of its own body of literature, WePretendToBeDwarfsOutOfTolkien Inc is more likely to hire a developer who's already proficient in the language since she would need less training.
Can't you see how utterly, completely, truly madly and deeply retarded this logic is?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
sure, but then they could just stick with C++, and focus their energies on making good quality libraries and tools to work with it and let the good developers learn how to use it properly.
Its not as hard as many people think, but maybe they're confused by the possibilities the language affords, many of which nobody uses for day-to-day programming tasks.
It's no surprise that big programming organizations develop new languages to better suite their own needs. If you are running a large server farm, a language that helps you have 25% fewer memory corruption crashes without sacrificing speed is a huge thing. Outside adoption may vary, but over time some will succeed and supplant C/Java as default choices for new projects.
Personally I am hoping for something that unifies memory and external resource management without leaks, crashes or perceptible GC pauses. This may be unsolvable in theoretical general case, but a language and runtime can provide many patterns for common practical needs. Even having reliably destroyed local instances that can not be returned out of the method in Java would be a huge thing for helping people remember to close files.
Objective-C is very, very, very usable on any *nix platform. If you think it is only useful in Apple proprietary environments, that says a lot about you and nothing about Objective-C.
The only time there is any Apple-specific constraint is when you're using their libraries. That may be most often the case, but there is no reason that it needs to be on your own projects. Serious projects don't just glom onto whatever the nearest proprietary library is, they actually have to evaluate options and make choices. You can absolutely choose non-Apple libraries whenever you want.
A truer statement would have been: "Objective-C is mostly used on 1 platform for entirely social reasons."
Welcome! We're always glad to see representatives of HR visit us on Slashdot. Next week as you write a requirement for five years of Swift into that new job posting, you can thank us for having inspired you in your quest for offense-free skill categories.
Red Hat has Ceylon. Mozilla has Rust. Google has Go and Dart. Apple has Swift. Typesafe has Scala. SpringSource has Groovy. Oracle has Java. Microsoft has C#. Etc, etc, etc.
Ceylon caught a lot of flack initially from some members of the Scala community (and I guess some Java people) for "doing unnecessary work", "not listening to the community" and "not complying with standards. Apple caught the same flack for Swift with the same nonsensical arguments. Go has similarly been criticized for being weird.
The fact of the matter is that each one of these companies has their own requirements, requirements that "standard" languages like Java and C++ don't meet.
Also, which each new language comes a potential set of new innovations for new or existing languages to build upon. With Ceylon it's union types and null variables handled by built-in Optional types. With go, it's interfaces that are not explicitly implemented. Etc, etc, etc.
Bottom line: This is a good thing.
This space left intentionally blank.
C has been around since 1972.
Or when the military decided they needed their own language: Ada. How did that work out?
Masculine pronouns can be used in the gender neutral sense in English. Feminine pronouns cannot. Posting as AC because I don't want saying obvious fucking truths archived on my slashdot account, thanks to the witch hunts political shitfucks will inevitably engage in.
He means "I tinkered with this new thing and it seemed pretty easy enough, so that was enough - I never needed to use it, so I never found out all the edge cases I know about in the mainstream languages I use every day".
No, that's not what I meant. After spending a week learning Go, I wrote a couple of applications in it, but after the first week I was not learning Go, I was learning libraries and patterns.
Read the Go spec: these is almost nothing to it. The language has ridiculously few features. The main design goal of the language was to make code very readable and maintainable which means all devs basically know the entire language spec.
Don't read the C++ spec. You don't have time for that and it keeps growing. C++ has lots of features, which is both a good and a bad thing, but not all languages are like that.
The thing about companies of that magnitude is that unless you're a rockstar programmer (most of us aren't) you're just signing up for some bullshit lord of the flies atmosphere where the job is so internally competitive that it becomes overly stressful and completely unenjoyable. Yes the pay is probably good, however the environment is anything but healthy.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
You're not a "real" programmer until you've rolled your own framework or language. Sooner or later, everyone worth their salt gets some "bright ideas" and gives it a try. :)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
"Similarly, Go was designed to make it easier to build complex systems. The old workhorses of the networked software programming industry, C++ and Python, just couldn't keep up with the demands that Google was placing on it."
Is there an explanation of what those demands could be? C++ and Python are very different languages in every way
Very well, actually. ADA is very good at what it does well, which is creating deterministic code that can be procedurally validated. It was created for a design environment that is the exact, deliberate opposite of Agile. If you think you should build once a day or week, then ADA is not for you. If you can not simulate your live environment because it's a thousand miles up in orbit and a bug costs half a billion dollars and 2 years to the next launch window, ADA is for you. If virtually memory machines are a pointless risk and dynamic memory allocation is anthema, then go for ADA. If not, stay the fuck away, because it will make you a grey beard, one way or another.
It's the same old story as MS right? I mean, you feel like you dominate a market so you start throwing your weight around. You want programmers to be MS programmers. That was their strategies, go after the coders as they are the ones who make the decisions. For every big software shop that dictates the technology, there are a hundred one man shows where the coder is selecting his own stack. Whether its putting out and steering people to your own language or own browser or whatever, its a move that betrays your sense of dominance and power. What's nutty is that it just doesn't work. Google is not evil until they are in the driver seat and screw everybody.
-- A cat is no trade for integrity!
People that are actually good at developing software will be so in any language after a short time. People that are at the low end of the skill range will learn these languages like Go in order to have some skill at all. They will still produce code that sucks though. Or said differently: Preselecting candidates based on whether they know a specific language is usually a hugely expensive mistake in the long run. Not that other companies are routinely making this basic mistake all the times. Just shows that there is not good reason to work at Google or apple these days and they are better avoided.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Seriously.
Exactly. Yet this is something the man-haters would like to redefine.
Some feminists are truly interested in equality.
However a large portion of them are man-haters who are using their platform to gain PRIVILEGE for women.
A campaign has re-strengthened in Australia to remove the 10% GST (Goods and Services Tax / VAT) from tampons. See here
They use emotional slogans such as "stop taxing my periods".
However, I'd like to know why the Australian government won't also consider removing the GST from men's grooming products (razors, shaving cream, etc). Facial hair growth is a natural bodily function for men. And at least one GOVERNMENT department sends men home if they turn-up to work unshaven ... even though facial hair has no bearing on their ability to perform their duties! (Imagine the uproar if they sent women home for not shaving their legs. And why is the Sex Discrimination Commissioner remaining silent in defending these male citizens?)
To say nothing about why there is a GST on toilet-paper ... isn't going to the loo a natural bodily function as well?
Ouch. Someone being offended on the lack of their gender (or not their gender) being in an article sounds sexist to me. Either way, the people who would get offended because something like "he" is used or that "maid" was used or that "fireman" was used should probably spend more time focusing on the subject of what the author is talking about and worry less about semantics and how "nice" someone is trying to appeal.
Apple can review all the app code written.
Outside developers don't submit their source code to Apple.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Hire well-trained polyglots.
When was the last time that you saw a recruitment ad for a polyglot?
They all demand specific (and often unrealistic) experience in a specific language or small set of languages. Usually paired with specific platform.
Companies don't want flexible people, they demand cheap easily-replaceable cogs. And what they often get are people willing to lie about their experience, since the "must-have" list is so long an inflexible that maybe 3 people on the planet will fit and all of them are undoubtedly already making more than was offered.
Aparently the use of the word "they" as gender/number fuzz dates back a long way. Long enough that it's considered no less correct that a lot of other rule-breaking exceptions to the supposedly logical structure of the English language.
Maybe I'm showing my age and upbringing, but use of "she" in a document mentally throws my gender-neutral/faceless person reading out of whack in a way that "he" does not. I can live with "they" if other people have the same reaction to "he". It's less grating then (sic) when people with a gender agenda think that they have free reign (sic) to make me tow (sic) the line. If I'm trying to interpret a technical document, I really don't need to be simultaneously wasting energy thinking about it as a gender manifesto.
You won't create a new language if you just need to develop a small app, however, when things become big, creating a new language to fit what you are trying to build may become a worthwhile investment.
Good programmers can pick up a language very quickly anyways.
They hired Rob Pike.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
...and it had nothing at all to do with recruitment.
When Apple came up with the LLVM static analyzer, they became much more aware of just what kind of coding mistakes were costing them the most time and money, and Swift addresses those issues.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Yes, it's very unfair to men that they don't have their own pronouns.
Easy; recruit the students who wrote thesis in *your* language.
Push it into the Universities (stray Dollars help), drive curriculum, ensure adoption.
Have you not noticed that almost all programmers are men? That means that when you use the word "she", you're saying it only to make a political statement, not because you think it actually describes the situation.
Disclaimer: IANAL. This post is, however, legal advice, and creates an attorney-client relationship.
Universally and without exception?
Don't be stupid. Some web apps sucks, many others don't. Just like applications written for every platform over the entire history of the electronic digital computer.
They don't tend to suck more or less than apps for Windows, Android, iOS, QNX, MacOS, Linux,OS/2, or any other platform -- developed in any language.
Want to see an absurd number of really crummy apps? Look no further than Google Play or the Apple App Store. Do we then confirm that Android and iOS apps suck, and that everyone should be frightened by them? Of course not. (To that one misguided mod: Blind ideology isn't informative.)
Required reading for internet skeptics
they're afraid of standards-based web apps
Obviously. Why do you think they developed Dart?
Required reading for internet skeptics
Why single one group out at all? Why not use "he or she"
Because it's awkward. Apparently, not many people know how to use 'they' as third-person singular pronoun.
(Inexplicably, they don't seem to have any trouble using 'their' that way. e.g. "One of the editors left their brain at home." I weep for the future...)
Required reading for internet skeptics
Doesn't always work. Sometimes it just looks wrong if it's clear that only one person is involved.
[Opens can of worms] Of course there's always the singular "they" ...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It makes recruitment easier because no one else will employ them. Making them cheap and dedicated.
Except that Google is developing AngularJS 2 in TypeScript, which is also Microsofts "baby".
I just assumed it was about controlling even more of the stack, and helping to bring about the time when they control it all..
As an older programer sometimes I am cynical and assume they created a new language that no one knows so they can hire the cheapest, youngest labor (since only young people not currently working or paying a mortgage have time to master a language).
That being said, Go is not too bad (although I find I have a hard time with the dependency management tools). Swift feels like a language aimed at broadening the programmer base. Cognitively I feel reminded of Python when I play with it, which is a bit of a barrier since I never liked python much myself.
Peace, or Not?
If you're proficient in an internal language, you're more likely to remain working there. Eventually, you'll be paid in Google bucks or Apple dollars, which are not legal tender anywhere else in the world.
MicroSoft liked a Java-like languge, but found it too slow or rebuffed in suggesting changes to Sun. So htye basically made a hJava-like language themselves. For most of its history its only run in the MicroSoft ecosystem, although there are feeble attempts to make it multiplatform.
In a nutshell, if the only tools you know how to use well are the tools specific to your current and no other possible employer, then you are stuck and screwed if they no longer need you. Your negotiating position is shot. That is some hyperbole but quite a bit of truth.
There are only 6,863,795,529 types of people in the world.
Swift == (Objective-C)++
One perhaps significant fact: the Go compiler is licensed under a BSD license, Swift has started as proprietary, but may be going over to something open this year.
While Go and Swift are interesting incremental improvements, they are not taking into account what we learned about programming languages. In many ways, these two languages seem firmly stuck in the 1980s. For example, Go has no generics, and as far as I can tell, Swift still does not have the kind of true generic types I introduced in XL in 2000, i.e. the possibility to call "ordered" all types that have a less than, and then define functions with "ordered" instead of having to use <T> all over the place just like in C++ (and please, could we stop using angle brackets?)
More generally, there was a lot to be learned from more dynamic languages deriving from Lisp. Being able to treat code as data (homoiconicity) completely changes things. It means your language can be extended in itself, just like Lisp integrated object-oriented capabilities effortlessly. It means you can do metaprogramming, introspection, reflection, dynamic code generation, in a natural way rather than with specialised ad-hoc features. All things that Go or Swift spectacularly fail to do.
A real language redesign does not bring you incremental benefits, it should bring orders of magnitude on many tasks. I speak from experience. In XL, I can do complex arithmetic in 11 lines of code. What about Swift or Go? Ask yourself why Go can't offer complex arithmetic as a library package? Similarly, in Tao3D, I can do things HTML5 just can't, in a much less verbose, much higher-level language, and simple animations take 30 times less code than in JavaScript. The 30x factor tells me that I invented something new. Many others can demonstrate similar innovation.
I fail to see benefits of a similar order of magnitude with Swift or Go, and it annoys me. Companies like Apple and Google have the means, if only the financial ones, to make bigger things happen, in particular when smaller teams like ours already did a lot of investigative work.
-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
For exactly the same reason as I give a flying fsck about your opinion.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
You must be using beta, if you're going to try to give me introductions kiddo. You joined a couple decades too late for that.
Use of "they" being disallowed by the popular style guides is exactly the point I was making in mentioning style guides. Thank you for taking the time to understand what you're responding too before commenting. You added so very much to the discourse.